24 Simple and Free SEO Tools to Instantly Improve Your Marketing

Whenever I dream up a home improvement project for my place, I end up working smartest and fastest when I have the right tools at my disposal. It’s amazing the difference a good tool can make – and the extra time it takes to get work done without a helpful tool.

Fast-forward to online marketing. How can you work smarter and faster with SEO?

I’ve collected a big sampling of the best free SEO tools on the market—tools with a wide variety of uses and covering a number of common needs. These tools are fast, free, and easy-to-use. I hope you find one or two (or twenty) you can put to good use, today.

24 Free and Easy SEO Tools

Enter a URL, and this tool will test the loading time and performance for desktop and for mobile, plus identify opportunities to improve (and pat you on the back for what you’re doing well). The mobile results also come with a user experience score, grading areas like tap targets and font sizes.

Moz crunches data from more than 15 different sources—including Google, Foursquare, and Facebook—to score your brick-and-mortar business on how it looks online. Results come complete with actionable fixes for inconsistent or incomplete listings.

Enter a keyword or group of keywords into the tool, and Google will return all sorts of helpful stats to guide your keyword strategy: monthly search volume, competition, and even suggested terms you might not have considered.

Searching Google.com in an incognito window will bring up that all-familiar list of autofill options, many of which can help guide your keyword research. The incognito ensures that any customized search data Google stores when you’re signed in gets left out. Incognito may also be helpful to see where you truly rank on a results page for a certain term.

Create custom code so that your reviews, events, organizations, and people are displayed the way you want on search pages. Once you’ve created your schema code, copy and paste to your website, or try the free WordPress plugin for an even easier implementation.

Enter your site, and this tool will strip out everything but the guts, revealing your website the way search spiders see it. This particular view can be helpful to see the hierarchy you’ve given particular elements (maybe without realizing it!).

I’ve shied away from referencing any toolbars thus far, but the Moz toolbar is just too good to pass up. Once installed, the Moz toolbar can show you SEO insights from within Google search results pages and at any particular website.

Robots.txt files let the web robots know what to do with a website’s pages. When a page is disallowed in robots.txt, that’s instructions telling the robots to completely skip over those web pages. There are some exceptions in which case a robots.txt might be ignored, most notably malware robots that are looking for security issues.

The Microsoft SEO Toolkit combines quite a few different tools into one. Used together, it can analyze your site and provide recommendations on how to make your site’s content more SEO-friendly, including tweaks to your sitemap and robots.txt. Sorry to all of the Apple folks, this one seems to be Windows-only!

Further resources

Putting together a list of free SEO tools can be a daunting task. There are hundreds out there! I aimed to grab the ones that we’ve found valuable here at Buffer and the ones you can use via the web within minutes to get some amazing insights.

If you’re interested in even more tools—like, hundreds!—here are a few places to start:

Which SEO tools are your favorite? Do you prefer web tools like these or browser plugins and spreadsheets?

I’d love to hear any tips you’re willing to share in the comments!

Editors Note: This post was originally published on Aug 25, 2014 – we’ve made some updates to this post to highlight some new tools that have entered the SEO scene. Are we missing your favorite tool? Let us know in the comments below 🙂

I think you got down most of the free tools for sure. There’s plenty of folks in this industry who only use one SEO tool and I always think they’re missing a trick. Everything has its strengths and weaknesses.

Courtney

I’m new to social media marketing and SEO so this is a great resource list! Thanks for the helpful information.

Thanks for vetting that one, Conrad! Seems like when I ran it the results were quite comprehensive. It might be helpful to know which areas to focus on and which ones (meta keyword tags?) to put on the backburner. 🙂

Nice list Kevan. As their US Ambassador it would be remiss of me not to let you know http://www.majesticseo.com offers free backlink analysis of sites you own including assigning citation, trust and topical flow metrics at a granular level. If you’re not aware of them let me know and I can take you through the platform one day soon.

Johnathan Stevens

Very comprehensive list of tools and best of all FREE for
the cheap in me! Awesome!

Amazing. This is a great list indeed. It is really helpful for a newbie like me. Thanks sir for sharing.

InkThemes

A must read post I would say…

Quite informative and balanced..

Great content Kevan.. Loved the way you expressed it…

^Deep.

sagarnangare

Has anyone checked SERPscope? Very amazing tool. it need to install either on local server or you can install on server which has PHP/MySQL combination. http://serposcope.serphacker.com/

dash

how do you fix the pictures that can be compressed or lossless pictures.
I am currently on the google developer page and also looked online to see if I can find a video of how to do so but can’t find a thing.

Also is there a way how I can know what pictures need to be fixed, because what I see here needs to be fixed but can’t click each to see what needs to be fixed.

Thanks for the list. Few tools are paid only.. Otherwise I’m Impressive to see

ericvergil

Moz toolbar is just great seo tool I have ever use.

Sam Fisher

Thanks for your tools are not only free, but awesome. Except I use http://sg.serpstat.com instead of keywordtool.io because its “question only tab” mode, so you can generate titles for your text. Keywordtool is still useful because of its youtube functionality.
As for ahrefs, free version lacks exporting functionality and that’s an issue.

With
regards to free SEO tools, there are lots of available utilized for different
purposes like checking backlinks, pageranks, market and keyword research,
analytics etc. It will become hard to decide the relative importance and
usability of every tool. Hence, in this post We have compiled a listing of free
SEO tools I personally use that have made my work easier.Moz rank

folpyx

Hi, I have favourite seo tool called analytio.co.uk which is tracking my keyword position in google serp. That’s really good tool.

buildersadelaide

I also like ahrefs. Not sure which is the most comprehensive though!

jriff

You might want to check out http://monsido.com – it is an online webmaster tool that does a full website audit. It scans your website every 7 days.

Hello Kevan,
Thanks for this great collection of tools! On GeoRanker.com we have just published some new free local SEO tools, which we want to share with you! It’s about a Keywords density tool, a Local Rank Checker and a Citation sources tool You find all these tools here: https://www.georanker.com/free-local-seo-tools.

Can you take a look over them and give us your thoughts? We will love to hear your feedback on it and if you find them useful, we would love to see them listed in your collection of tools.

Amazing collection! I was also looking for this kind of collection. You can add another seo tools serplab.co.uk to check the result of Google SERP of any website. I have used many tools to check my site’s health in Google SERP. But it is totally free better than any premium seo tools.
Thanks!http://www.whmpress.com/features

Hi Kevin, first of all thanks for the great list. I already knew some great SEO tools, but there are always new tools to discover (I really did not know the Schema Creator, will save me a lot of time and headache!)

I’ve been busy building my own (free) tool which can help you bulk check urls for their status (redirects, 404, etc.) and let’s you export them (or a selection). I would really be very thankful if you could check it out (www.urlcheckr.com) and when you like it perhaps even add it to the list.

The Self-Test uses Predictive Analytics, which allows you to test 1,000’s of possible combinations of an organic search result, which is significantly different to A/B Testing or Split Testing, which are limited to testing two possibilities at a time. Predikkta saves you time over traditional testing.Detail more : https://www.predikkta.com/

Sarah

Do you want to attract more visitors to your website in a
very short period? Predikkta assures you get much more visitors by improving
your website’s performance. For further information, please, make a visit athttp://www.predikkta.com

H Kevan it’s really fantastic job . You just eased the work for any SEO professional. Some tools i am already used but will try on the rest which appeared new for me. You can also add Solid SEO Tools to your list as i got it too useful and it is 100% free . You can check it at http://solidseotools.com. I hope you to continue the job ahead. Thanks

Thanks for this post. I am a new blogger. I am facing problem with my page speed. My page speed is too slow. What can i do now to increase my page speed? You can check my site http://www.blogornate.com/ and give me some suggestion please.

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